Band that survived Paris attack to perform in Tel Aviv

American rock band Eagles of Death Metal will perform at Tel Aviv’s Barby Club Monday night on the tail end of its summer tour around Europe.

It’s been nearly a year since Eagles of Death Metal, known also as EODM, was performing last November in Paris at the Bataclan concert hall where Muslim terrorists attacked and killed 89 people, leading to a total of 130 people dead in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris.

Since then, the California band, founded nearly 20 years ago by high school friends and singer Jesse Hughes and drummer/guitarist Joshua Homme, have earned a kind of proxy fame for their reactions to the tragic concert hall attack.

Never ones to mince words, frontman Hughes told his Israel audience during a visit in July 2015 that he had written former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, telling the BDS spokesperson, “F**k you, ain’t nobody gonna keep me from my people here in Tel Aviv.”

Hughes reacted emotionally after the terrorist incident, relating his own escape from the concert hall, as well as discussing his views on the need to carry arms. At the time of the attack, Hughes, a card-carrying National Rifle Association member, told French radio iTélé, “I know people will disagree with me, but it just seems like God made men and women, and that night guns made them equal. And I hate it that it’s that way. I think the only way that my mind has been changed is that maybe that until nobody has guns everybody has to have them.”

He also spoke then of a possible inside job, blaming Muslim staff at the Bataclan for conspiring with the terrorists, an allegation that the concert hall vehemently denied. Eagles of Death Metal did play in Paris again in February, but two French summer festivals canceled the band’s appearance over Hughes’s remarks.

His band co-founder and high school friend, Homme, is credited as a member of the band, but does not usually perform with EODM and was not in Paris at the time of the attack. Homme is also the frontman of Queens of the Stone Age, and often collaborates with other bands, such as Them Crooked Vultures and Arctic Monkeys.

There were other, more positive actions taken in reaction to the attack. After Hughes spoke and prayed on the phone with U2 leadman Bono, his band created the Play It Forward campaign, in which they asked other bands to cover their easy-to-listen-to Zipper Down track “I Love You All the Time,” which had been the next song on the Bataclan set list that November in Paris.

They also ended up performing with U2 live in December.

Thirteen other bands ended up providing covers to “I Love You All the Time,” and for each cover, Eagles of Death Metal offered links to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and its own Play It Forward store to make it as easy as possible for fans to listen to each song.

The band’s royalties for the song were sent on to the Sweet Stuff Foundation, an organization that assists musicians in need, and at the time, allocated all donations to victims of the Paris attack.

The current band lineup during this most recent summer tour includes Hughes on vocals and guitar, guitarist and vocalist Dave Catching, bassist Matt McJunkins, guitarist Eden Galindo and drummer Jorma Vik.

The band, which plays a kind of bluegrass rock without an ounce of heavy metal sound (their name is just an inside joke), is known to perform with a sardonic sense of humor, often using fake names such as Carlo von Sexron and Mr. Boogie Man. And they’re not above using their newfound fame to push their musical agenda.

“The fact is that a beautiful side effect of all of this is that I have an even bigger dick than I ever had before, which means I am going to go out there and try to swing it as hard as I fucking can, I assure you,” Hughes told Rolling Stone Magazine last December.

Tickets for the Monday, September 5 evening performance are available at the Barby Tel Aviv website.